Today, after just recently posting a blog complaining about the incompetence of doctors, I come across this article.

One in every seven hospitalized Medicare patients are harmed by treatment mistakes, according to new analysis by the Department of Health & Human Services released Tuesday.

The report cites a variety of “adverse events” or causes for treatment errors, including excessive bleeding after surgery, urinary tract infections linked to catheters and incorrect medications. Researchers estimate that these types of adverse events contribute to 15,000 deaths per month or 180,000 deaths each year, according to the report.

Some patient-rights groups are calling these findings alarming.

“The country is in a patient safety crisis,” said David Arkush, the director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Division in a statement.

I’m reminded of an Oprah episode I watched about a year and half ago. That Dr. Oz guy was telling viewers who may be going in for limb surgery that they should not only use a felt tip pen to mark the correct limb the doctor should operate on, but they should also use the pen to indicate that the incorrect lamb should not be operated on. The idea being that if a doctor chooses incorrectly, he would never see anything you’d written on the correct limb, since he would never look at it.

It’s like, I’m sorry, but if the doctor operating on me is such an incompetent moron that I need to mark which fucking limb he’s supposed to cut off then I don’t want to be anywhere near the guy, much less have him waving a scalpel at me.

I vaguely recall reading a story about a doctor who mistakingly sewed his own scrotum on to a woman’s face. And when she woke up and started crying, he just laughed at her and called her “gobble head.”

These are the kind of people we’re dealing with, folks. Real sickos.